Bookstruck: (Do You Wanna Hear a Story?)
by xXxJazzy B. RealxXx
Summary: "He could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do―" And for a child who couldn't, it only made her think of walls with no windows and bedrooms with closed doors, parental guidance that advised her to, "never go anywhere until you've learned how to suffocate under the weight of your own bones." Tangled/Frozen AU one-shot.


. ❄ _(i was the yesterday waiting for my tomorrow, and you were the future running from today...)_

_ ❄._

❄ .

❄ .

_. ❄_

❄ .

_"You're hiding in the library again too, huh?" _He'd pat her head like a kitten's, with the flat base of his palm, doing what he did to all children without childhoods._ "Don't cry,"―_pat, pat―"_do you wanna hear a story?"_

The stories in question were redundant. Swashbucklers. Adventurers. Nobles. Rogues. Figureheads of freedom. Men made out of stardust.

_"He could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do―"_

―And for a child who couldn't, it only made her think of walls with no windows and bedrooms with closed doors, parental guidance that advised her to, "_never go anywhere until you've learned how to suffocate." _

Yet_ Flynnigan Rider_ could go anywhere he wanted to go, he could do anything that he wanted to do. No right ― no wrong ― _no rules for him; _he was free_. _Her heart was a bird and her ribs were a cage, but the man with the smolder was born a phoenix. She projected her freedom onto the rogue made of ink, picturing how it would be to live inside the paragraphs, to be one with the wind and sky, to be―

_"Just like him,"_ the boy ejaculated, strung to his top note. _"Someday, I'll be just like him __― _straight out of all the fairytales. I'll have my own castle, with my own life, and live far, far away ― as close to the sun as possible! I'll rise like the break of dawn and catapult off cloud nine."

The girl paused, feeling her heart muscles twist and churn like a key turning in a lock.

_"The past will be in the past, and I'm never going back; I don't care what they're going to say. __I'll test the limits and break through._" (and then they'd never see poor orphan Eugene Fitzherbert cry; they'd never read about 'the sob story'...?)

She wiped her tears off the illustration in his book, aware that she could never plagiarize the print or his lyricism. He, like the figureheads of freedom, possessed that peculiar, hormone-raging lust for escape, the confidence to shed his sheepskin and _make life happen_. But every wild boy had a shackled foot and a broken childhood that kept him down. She saw the fragments when he looked away, smiling at the window like an earthbound star that no one ever tried to name a god after.

_"I want to hear the story behind your eyes..."_

He looked straight at her. Closing in. Closing up. An oyster with a pearl broken in two parts. _"I don't have a story."_ (_you wanted valuable treasure because you were nobody's treasure)_

She frowned. His body language grew timid and awkward; goosebumps breaking across his arms, knees knocking with the same _please-don't-look-too-close_ that lurked behind her _24-hour_ smiles. They both stifled self-defeating habits; the undeniably weak self-esteems; the intolerable glitches in character that they wanted to pretend weren't real. All she had was a three-lined script to perform a role her parents wrote for her; all he had were storybooks to patch up holes that had no happy endings _(our inklines were smudged but we tried our best to not seep through the paper).__  
_

_"Do you want to see Orion's Belt?"_ The boy looked at her upside down, never rightside up_. "If I took you to the stars, would you make me a castle?"_

She squeezed her gloves, palmed her tears, and shook her head under the fingers that clutched it. _"You'd catch a cold..."_

He laughed. Loudly. Uncontrollably. Shakily. _(you and i weren't meant to be in the same plot)_

_"Fitzherbert! Where'd you run off to, you no-good shoe-shiner?!"_

She jumped.

He dropped his book in horror.

Wait.

...No.

_No no no no no no_

_no no no no no no_

_no no no no no no― _

The sprigs of ice crystallizing the wall behind her looked like distorted, evil trees. The boy with the storybook looked like a ghost in a shell. Fear threw her and she flew across the library, flailing and tripping behind shelves to melt between pages and pages of parallel universes where melodramas ended with _happily ever after _in big, cursive letters. Two hours of sobbing against cold walls and there were no _fairy god mothers_ to cry into; guards were stampeding the halls, shouting left and right, and she was folded up on the floor at the back of the _Death & Tragedy_ aisle.

_"Hey."_ Hushed, nervous laughter. _"Don't hide in the books; you'll get papercuts!"_

Her stockings were soaked with tears. She could feel the nerves in his hand as it trembled down on her head, pulsating with something greater than all the climaxes in his stories...

_"Don't!"_ Her wail was a firecracker. _"Don't touch me!"_ The hand snapped back. _"Pl-Please..."_ Sniffle. _"Just, pl-please...I'm..." _A curse. _(and you didn't have enough ink to rewrite that...)_

Pause. Crack. Shatter.

_"...I don't like myself that much, either..."_ His voice was almost as wobbly as his hand had been; pity and fear and laughter and _what-in-God's-name-is-happening_ mixed together. _"But―..."_ Hesitation. _"But you're lucky."_

_"Why?" _Her voice became icy.

_"Because at least you get to be straight out of a fairytale."_

She turned her face in the carpet with gritted teeth, shoulders trembling as she tried to hold back the tears, _(i was the plot hole in my own life; **my parents'** lives)._

_"Look..." _He smiled like it hurt, like it scared him but he wanted to anchor another child without a childhood, like his brain had been reduced to a slab of turkey meat but that was fine. _"This is__―..._where you belong." A book titled _The Snow Queen_ was opened by dirty, shaking hands. _"In a storybook."_

She looked up at it, as if waking from a trance, and looked at him, as though seeing him for the first time. Tears slipped off her cheeks one by one, and despite all his goosebumps and shaking hands, he stared at her the way he stared at storybooks.

The silence began filling up the room like bathwater, spilling over her dam and running into her nostrils with a fieriness, drowning out every pocket of air she could've choked on. When his eyes found their smile again, she cowered at the sad, trembling look of them, like he was seeing himself somewhere in hers.

_"...I like you." _An absurb plot twist.

_"...Why?"_ An absurb moment of weakness.

_"...Because you don't like yourself that much, either." _Ended by an absurb, nervous laugh._  
_

She sniveled and laughed with her face against her gloves. Quietly. Uncontrollably. Shakily. And he patted her head like a kitten's, with the flat base of his palm..._(you became the book i never wanted to put down)_

❄.

_❄ ._

_. ❄ _  
❄ .

* * *

_"I'll make two pairs of cardboard wings, one for you and one for me, so that one day when we get old we can fly to the sun and make sky castles to live in forever..."_ ~

* * *

❆ **Author's Note**

Request. Challenge: 900-1000 word count.

It's weak, but my brain is still recovering from a coma _(I.E. I have no idea how to write anymore)_. That, or I need open heart surgery. It's actually amazing to me that she _(the requester)_ is mature enough to understand writing like this, but the _Crystal Children_ of this generation are a whole new breed. _The Quivering Pens _was not something I wanted to recommend to her _(if only for its ideologically sensitive content)_, so I detached _(or decapitated)_ one of its predominant themes and gave it its own AU for her to enjoy. Albeit a very simplified, fluffy one that will never occur in _The Quivering Pens_ for as long as it lives.

To clarify, even though I like it unlisted: Elsa's eleven. Eugene's the orphan making ends meet as a lap-dog to the nobles. Yes, he knew what she could do with snowflakes before the Anna accident; he just never saw the craggier aspect of her powers.

_"Do you wanna hear a story?"_ juxtaposes, _"Do you wanna build a snowman?"_ purposely. The setting was meant to be told like a memory being looked back on, and I believe _"Bookstruck"_ was supposed to be serial, but I'll most likely edit the living skittles out of this **one-shot** when I get a jumpstart on writing decent literature. So if it's quite trite, I'll go back in.

Credits: _"sky castles" quote by _intricately-ordinary_*_


End file.
